Garrett Graff, a writer and historian who specializes in 'near history', discusses his book, 'UFO', about the US government's search for alien life. He touches upon how we often misunderstand UFO sightings, suggesting they could be due to a mix of physical anomalies and governmental or adversary secret flight technologies. Graff also shares his belief in the possibility of alien civilizations, arguing probabilities suggest the existence of life outside Earth. He then relates UFO conspiracies to a societal mistrust in government and institutions, tying it back to events like the Watergate scandal. Graff finally introduces his forthcoming oral history book on D-Day, emphasizing how his work emphasizes explaining and organizing complex events in an understandable and comprehensive way.

"When people ask 'do UFOs?'...That's not actually the question that they mean. The question that they really mean is, 'are we alone?' Because the truth of the matter is of course UFOs exist. All a UFO is an unidentified flying object, and there are things out there that we don't know what they are. Whether those are extraterrestrial is a very different question and potentially unrelated to the question of, are there extraterrestrials."

Transcript and podcast recording below. 
Contents:

• 00:31 Exploring the Mysteries of UFOs

• 03:05 The Probability of Alien Life

• 06:21 The Government's Role in UFO Research

• 19:03 The Impact of Conspiracy Theories

• 29:40 The Connection Between UFOs and Politics

• 33:28 The Importance of Trust in Government

• 47:21 The Writing Process and Future Projects

Podcast wherever you get podcasts or links below. Video above or on YouTube. Transcript follows below.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

• All links:  https://pod.link/1562738506

Transcript (this is AI assisted and errors are possible)

Ben: Hey everybody, I'm super excited to be speaking to Garrett Graff. Garrett is a writer and historian. His latest book is UFO, about the US government's search for alien life. Previous award winning work includes Watergate, exploring the political scandal, The Only Plane in the Sky, which is an oral history of 9/11, and Raven Rock, about US government plans to survive existential threats.

Garrett, welcome. 

Garrett: Thanks so much for having me. It's great to see you. 

Ben: In your latest book you weave the machinery of government The search for extraterrestrial life and the mysteries of unexplained flying objects. What do you think was most misunderstood in what you learned? 

Garrett: Oh, that's a good question. I think, to me, there were a couple of things that stood out.

One is the possibility, when people hear UFO, we immediately leap to think extraterrestrial. And part of the challenge is, UFOs probably don't have one answer or one solution. It is probably a mix of physical objects that we don't understand currently. Some of it is our own government's secret flight development efforts.

Some of it is adversary government's secret flight development efforts. And then, some of it is almost certainly phenomenon that we do not yet understand. Meteorological, atmospheric astronomical phenomenon that we don't yet understand. When people ask do UFOs? Which is the question. that a lot of people start with when they hear something like, oh, you're working on a book about UFOs.

That's not actually the question that they mean. That the question that they really mean is, are we alone? Because the truth of the matter is of course UFOs exist. All a UFO is an unidentified Flying object, and there are things out there that we don't know what they are whether those are extraterrestrial is a very different question and potentially unrelated to the question of, are there extraterrestrials which I think is like part of the question.

When I spend some time in the book attempting to untangle because it is simultaneously possible that there are alien civilizations, life and intelligent life all across the universe and that all of it or most of it is too far away for us to ever know or have Meaningful contact with or might just not overlap with us and our civilization at this precise moment in the history of the universe, which is something that we can talk about, too.

Garrett: But One of the biggest revolutions that I try to capture in this book is the idea that the math is very much now on the side of the aliens. That we, as late as the 1990s, did not realize that there was a single planet outside of our own solar system. And we now believe that there are effectively planets orbiting every star in the universe.

And as we've come to understand the scale and size and scope of the universe, we've come to understand that number is on the order of magnitude of one sextillion of those planets might be habitable. Which is to say they fall into what scientists call the Goldilocks zone. They're not too hot, not too cold.

They could support water. They could support an atmosphere. They could support life as we recognize it. There's a whole other question, by the way, of what life could look like that we wouldn't recognize it, that we wouldn't be able to identify the characteristics of a planet that could support intelligent life or life That we would not recognize, that would not be carbon based, oxygen breathing life.

And there's a lot of interesting science around, what that could be as well. But that, to me A lot of what this book was, and a lot of what this research process was attempting to untangle all of these different threads. That people start with this question of, are UFOs real? Which is the wrong question to start with, and then breaking that down into what the right questions are to ask, and what the individual pieces of those answers end up being.

Ben: That was very clear in the book, that you had these two threads. One was Alien life outside of the planet and the other was these unexplained objects, as you say, which have on the surface, quite a mundane definition. So do you think for the, starting with the mundane ones and you listed all the likely explanations.

physical phenomena we don't understand yet government plans and the like. It seems that most of those you're tilting to having essentially a mundane explanation. Would you say that's correct? So like over 90 percent of them you think will maybe, may be mundane. Whereas also for the aliens, things out of this world, you're essentially saying the balance of probabilities, sextillion, I can't quite remember how many zeros that is, but it's a lot.

It's 15 or 20 zeros after a one, just on the balance of probabilities. Even if you put very low chances, you're going to have something, but also with those distances from the lifespan that humans might be around, if you say, draw it to how long dinosaurs been around, we might never meet any of that alien life because it's too.

Too far for distance travels. Do I have those two threads correct in terms of the arguments you're weaving into the book? 

Garrett: Absolutely. And what I think you see is this challenge that normally scientists and journalists and historians try to treat these two threads differently. They poo the like wacky conspiracy UFO people here on earth and then talk about the like serious astronomers doing serious science work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence out across the universe. And the truth of the matter, of course, is that these threads are not unrelated. And so my book really tried to weave these two stories together.

In part because for very obvious reasons, a big part of the question of are aliens visiting Earth is are aliens out there at all? And what's interesting as you get into it is Even the scientists who are dubious about UFOs being extraterrestrials don't necessarily argue that aliens don't visit Earth.

Carl Sagan in the 20th century, probably the most famous astronomer of the 20th century, was simultaneously the lead skeptic that UFOs represented extraterrestrial visitors and also simultaneously the lead proponent of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI across the universe. And his argument was that statistically, when you look at the percentage of planets and the probabilities of intelligent life arising et cetera, et cetera, The vastness of interstellar space.

You would expect aliens and other intelligent civilizations to visit earth about every hundred thousand or 200, 000 years. So his argument wasn't that aliens don't come here. It's that the thing that you saw last Tuesday night out your window is unlikely, statistically, to be the one day that the aliens stopped by in the last 200, 000 years.

Because Sagan's argument, the argument of a lot of the scientists who work on SETI is that our civilization is too new and too insignificant for anyone to care about, even if We exist and that alien, we have this like wonderfully human centric vision of us being worthy of other intelligent civilizations wanting to cross interstellar space to come visit us either out of friendship or because they want to invade us and harvest our organs for food or energy, what have you.

Whereas aliens are probably much more likely to treat Earth much like we would treat a rest area on the Jersey Turnpike, which is a stopover on the way from one interesting place to another. And that one of the things that we probably misunderstand is how first contact would actually exist.

Hollywood has given us over the decades, really three scenarios for our first contact with an alien civilization. And they are all very clear, unambiguous and earth focused. So you have the independence day flying saucer over the white house. Take me to your leader version. You have the Jodie Foster contact radio message from outer space version.

And then you have the E. T. Stranded Lone Traveler version. The much more likely scenario is that we will first encounter or detect effectively a piece of space trash. We will see a piece of a defunct spaceship or old space probe or some piece of wreckage floating through our solar system and know that it doesn't come from us.

But not know who it comes from. Harvard astronomy chair, Avi Loeb talks about this as the equivalent of the like empty plastic bag blowing through our cosmic backyard. That doesn't come from our Walmart. Like whose Walmart does that come from? And that the, we're going to be left with this puzzle of, where does this.

Is this civilization still around? Is this friend or foe? Where was this located when it launched, when it started? And it's possible, by the way, that we've actually already detected that. There was this In 2017 scientists belatedly detected a Interstellar object moving through our solar system that they named Oumuamua.

And we know very little about Oumuamua because we had missed it until it was already on its way out of the solar system. So we have this like far off trailing and deteriorating set of data about it, but it had pretty weird characteristics and we know that it came from outside of our our our solar system and galaxy we don't really know where it came from.

And some scientists, including that Harvard astronomy chair, Avi Loeb have speculated that it might have been a piece of wreckage of a spaceship or a space probe and that it's characteristics mimic what we would expect the characteristics of a. Light sail to be which is a object that scientists here on earth are just in the early stages of developing, but are the way that they this incredibly thin, incredibly wide.

Object that would be able to be powered basically by light from the sun or a laser that you could speed up, that you could get going pretty quickly and that maybe a muamua was some incredibly old light sail from some other civilization. And that one of the challenges of this is our technology just isn't that good.

One of the things as you, we begin to think about how and when and where we might detect. Other intelligent life or pieces of that space wreckage or probes from other planets, if they're not coming here, is that we don't actually have a piece of technology on Earth right now that could detect it.

And so I think A probe or spacecraft moving through our solar system at a fraction of the speed of light that, you would expect that any intelligent civilization that had mastered the vastness of interstellar space would have figured out a way. to move at a fraction of the speed of light.

And right now we don't have the technology to detect those objects. And one of the weirdest outcomes, one of the weirdest thought experiments of this is our solar system could be being passed by Interstellar spacecraft and space probes on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, once a decade, once a century.

Level and we wouldn't have any idea. Like we wouldn't know if aliens were actually just flying by earth right now. And we just didn't, we just weren't detecting them. And 

I was just saying, we only invented the radio not too long ago, 

and that ends up being a lot of the the science of these questions is coming to understand that, we're just a really young civilization in a pretty young and average planet.

Around a pretty average star located in the outer suburbs of a pretty ordinary Milky Way galaxy. And that, humanity is, on the order of a few 10, 000 years old. Certainly our level of technology for, space travel is like less than a century old. And our planet is about four and a half billion years old in a 14 billion year old universe.

And that the James Webb space telescope in the last couple of years is on an almost daily basis. It's transforming our understanding of the universe's size, scale, scope, and formation. And it has detected galaxies and stars that began to form as little as 300 million years ago. After the beginning of the universe.

And one of the weirdest aspects of this is the possibility that, again, life could be very common across the history of the universe and intelligent life common across the history of the universe. And that we are functionally alone right now. That, you could have had a billion year civilization.

Something that was far more advanced than anything we could possibly imagine. That could have risen and fallen. Perhaps a couple that have risen and fallen over the course of a billion years. across the history of the universe that we have still missed by several billion years. That came and went before our solar system ever began to, gather out of dust in the first place.

Ben: I really got that sense from the book that, that what, there was so much that we don't understand and we've only just Beginning to glimpse and the way you explain it is really well is that sort of my own, I hadn't thought about it too much, but I essentially the probability that there is some sort of intelligent life out there seems to have really risen amongst people who look like it.

People would say maybe 80, 90 percent chance this is true, whether they visited Earth is much smaller, but not zero. That was the interesting thing that maybe 1 percent or something above 0, 1 to 5 percent over some time, like not necessarily when humans have been about, like you say, what, would that be your sense of the probabilities?

And then I'm interested in exploring something you mentioned, which is a sort of segue, which is another theme through the book, these elements of conspiracy and also where governments or actually any organizations, but governments are really bad. Dealing with things that they don't that they know they don't know the machinery of government seems to be Really bad with dealing with uncertainty and conspiracies.

I guess are a sort of adjacency to that we see but is that my sense of where the probabilities have got to and what do you think about how Governments have essentially tried to cover up what they don't know, but it seems to be almost like an incompetence. We don't want to be seen not to know type of thing rather than anything malicious.

Garrett: Absolutely. There are three questions there that I will try to answer in turn. One being the probabilities across the universe. The second being the the government cover up. And then the third being the adjacent conspiracies. So the yes, I think The Easiest way to think about this is we're just too new to really have any understanding of what the likelihood of life around us could be or intelligent life around us could be and when the SETI field started spread.

Spread. 1950s, 1960s, the, one of the pioneers in that Frank Drake came up with this what is now probably the most famous equation in SETI, which is called the Drake equation. And it lays out the variables of calculating how many planets are, how many planets there are, how many.

What percentage of those planets might be habitable? What percentage of those? Planets that are habitable, does life develop, what percentage of planets that are habitable, where life developed, does intelligent life develop and on. But the most important variable in the equation is what scientists call L, the length of time an intelligent civilization exists.

And L is the whole ball game, which is. If the length of time of an intelligent civilization is in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, then we are functionally alone in the universe. If L is a million or hundreds of millions or a billion years, our universe might team with life.

If you look at humanity as a as your test case we're in that tens of thousands of range and there are a lot of reasons looking around the world, right where we are in the winter of 2024 to think that like humanity probably doesn't get another 10, 000 years. Like we, We might not get like another 150 or 200 years based on, the trajectory of, climate change and AI and technology and nuclear war and, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

There's also a big part of that equation, by the way, that is also it's not just how long a civilization lasts, but how long a civilization lasts that remains curious about its place in the universe. There's a sort of dark dystopian path in the years ahead for Earth where Humanity survives, but is, effectively so poisoned by a combination of misinformation and A.

I. And societal collapse that we just lose interest in exploring whether there's life out there in the rest of the universe. So that's the answer to the first question. So then you get to this question of. Is the government covering up its knowledge of extraterrestrials?

And I think that there's a lot of evidence to believe that the U. S. Government or governments anywhere in the world really are not covering up meaningful knowledge of extraterrestrials or what people intelligences. And, my most basic reasoning for that is I've covered national security for 20 years.

I come at this not as a lifelong ufologist who grew up on Star Trek and the X Files and read sci fi novels. I come at this as someone whose, previous books are about the Cold war and cyber security and counterterrorism and american presidency and you know I doubt government conspiracies mostly because They presuppose a level of competence, strategy, and forethought that is not on display in the rest of the work that government bureaucracies tend to do on a day to day basis.

And, I'm happy to talk more about that if you want. But that is not to say, though, that the government is not covering up It's knowledge and understanding of UFOs. The U S government governments all around the world are absolutely covering up their knowledge of UFOs. It's just not there for the reasons that people generally think part of this is there are two very obvious cloaks of secrecy that surround a lot of this subject.

One is what the, a lot of what the public thinks are UFOs. Are the government's own secret test projects. A huge percentage of public UFO sightings in the 1950s were the U2 spy plane which was a UFO. It was a, if you were a commercial pilot flying across the United States and you looked up and saw the U2 above you.

It was a plane that didn't look like anything that we knew planes to look like it, that flying at an altitude that planes were not known to fly and flying at speeds. Planes were not known to fly in the decades since you've had the same experience with the SR 71, the a 12 ox cart, the stealth fighter, the stealth bomber, and all of that stuff is still going on today.

You've got new secret drone projects. The U. S. government's, U. S. Air Force's new generation B 21 stealth bomber just had its inaugural flight test in November. These programs are still going on, and the government doesn't really tell us what they all are. Now, there's a second layer of this, which is, it's not just our government.

Some chunk of these UFO sightings are advanced adversary technology being tested against us. That's Chinese drones, Russian drones, Iranian drones. There's a lot to those technologies that we do not currently understand. About our adversaries capabilities. And one of the things that the Pentagon has talked about is in its renewed effort to understand UFOs and, what the government now calls UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomenon.

It identified a heretofore unknown. Transmedium Chinese drone, which is to say a Chinese drone that came out of the water and transitioned to flight, which was a technology that the U. S. government did not understand that China possessed. The government gets real squirrely talking about what its sensors And radars and surveillance networks detect and don't detect and what it understands about those adversary technologies.

So big, some sizable percentage of our, what the public thinks are UFOs, the U S government may have a better understanding of, in terms of what a, what might be, revolutionary. Technologies around You know our adversaries so then you get to the last part of your question which is the conspiracies around the government cover up.

And this was actually to me one of the biggest surprises of the book, which is, as you mentioned when you were introducing me. The book before this for me was my previous book was a history of Watergate and the scandal around Richard Nixon's presidency in the 1970s. And in a very weird way, the second half of this book on UFOs ends up being a sequel to a book about Watergate, because what it ends up being about is a The collapse of trust in government institutions, the collapse in faith in institutions, the collapse of agreed upon trust and truth that the U.

S. in particular, but societies around the world, underwent in the wake of the Pentagon Papers, Vietnam, Watergate, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee. And this recognition, the government can lie to you. And where you see that actually first take place in the U S in our politics is in the 1970s and eighties around UFOs.

And there is this series of revelations and conspiracies in the 1980s, some self proclaimed whistleblowers coming forward and some, quote unquote new evidence about things like the Roswell crash that come forward in the 1970s and 80s. that plant for the first time the idea of what we would now call and recognize as the deep state in the American political tradition.

This shadowy cabal of, professional government operatives working at cross purposes with elected officials and the American public, that there's like a hidden government inside our hidden government and that they this idea first exists in the context of UFOs in the 1980s.

The, those figures in some cases go on to become the founding members of the far right. conservative fringe in the 1980s and 1990s, including very specifically one guy named Bill Cooper, who is one of these UFO whistleblowers in the 1980s. He says that he's a, intelligence officer who's seen evidence of, the government's dealings with alien civilizations goes on to become one of the nation's most popular, real far right fringe talk radio hosts of the 1990s, up there with with the Rush Limbaugh's of the country, helps to inspire through his conspiratorial view of the world.

Tim McVeigh, who goes on to bomb the Oklahoma City Federal Building and carry out, the worst domestic terror attack in U. S. history. And also inspires and becomes the mentor, really, to a young Austin, Texas public access host named Alex Jones. Alex Jones, of course, becomes the founder of the 9 11 conspiracy.

myths, what we now call 9 11 truthers and that it's really Alex Jones who carries this forward into a new generation and, picks up the idea of the deep state and really carries it forward into the Trump era. And in a very weird and twisted way that I think most Americans don't realize and I certainly didn't realize until I was working on researching this book, I think you don't get January 6th.

And the big lie and the attempt to steal the election without the foundation that was laid intellectually by the UFO conspiracies of the 1980s and 90s and that this really ends up being This weird journey through 40 years of American conspiracies. And yet ends up in something that really threatens, starts with UFOs and then, threatens to upend American democracy in 2020.

Ben: That's really where the truth just seems larger than the fiction. And that's one of the remarkable things I picked up on the book in that second half is this, the stories we tell ourselves are so important, the narratives to get to where we are and these events. And I was wondering, reflecting back on that thread that you get from Watergate to today through these conspiracy theories.

Theories of which aliens is a big chunk. Is that one of the lessons we need to take away from political scandals and Watergate and the like? That when we harm trust in government and trust in our institutions, it allows These conspiracies, these tailways of thinkings to occur, and then they have all of these second and third order effects, which are just really hard to go through because they're going on their own narratives and putting the two books and the works together.

It seems to me there's that and that it seems to recur at least in modern. History, we've had this little bit of recurrence and where we are in trust in government Therefore and trust in institutions is potentially a more important thing to be worried about is that one of your takeaways from watergate?

Or was that is there something else that I should pick up on?

Garrett: Yeah, I think you're right. I think that there's you know to me the shame of watergate the Is You know, the way that it has, it poisoned a generation of politics that followed and caused or at least accelerated that collapse of trust in government institutions.

I think part of the challenge also, when you get into the conspiracies around UFOs, coming back to, what is my working theory, which is that the government is not covering up meaningful knowledge of of contact with extraterrestrials or non human intelligences, NHIs. You addressed a little bit in your original question to me, which is, it's really hard for governments and bureaucracies to say, I don't know.

And, I think in many ways the government is just as puzzled about the reality of UFOs as anyone else. Now the government, for the reasons that we talked about, advanced technology tests. Advanced sensor systems. It knows more than the average public. But it doesn't know what all ufos are and across 80 years of history there has been a stubbornly small percentage of public UFO reports that also puzzle the government.

In the earlier days, that was about 20 percent of public sightings the government couldn't solve. Today, with better technology and better data, that number hovers closer to 2%, 5%. Of public UFO sightings that also puzzle the government. Those, of course, are the only, to me, interesting UFO sightings, are the ones that actually puzzle the government.

Humans are incredibly terrible witnesses. for UFOs. A vast percentage of UFO sightings are things like the planet Venus, which is just a really bright star in the night sky. Or, in the modern era, a lot of UFO sightings end up being starlink satellites, which are bright and array themselves in weird lines in the sky, in ways that, people get alarmed about when they see them.

But, we know what those are once, once they're reported and, can untangle them. So the question to me is always what are the things that actually puzzle the government? And, the Pentagon office that works on this right now says it's about 2 percent in the, in, in this particular moment.

But it's really hard for a bureaucracy, particularly in a country like the United States, where we spend, 60 billion a year on intelligence and, round numbers, a trillion dollars a year on national defense and homeland security, to come out and say, there's some weird stuff out there that we don't really know what it is, flying around in our airspace.

And, that's a really unsatisfying answer. And it's one that bureaucrats don't like to provide to their bosses. And I think the problem is that's actually the best answer, which is the government doesn't really know. And one of the pieces of evidence that I point to in the book is what, to me, was the moment that I got interested in writing this book, which is since 2017, there has been a radical shift in the way That people in Washington talk about UFOs and you have begun to see serious people talk seriously about UFOs.

And it began in 2017 with a series of blockbuster reports from the New York Times and Politico that both laid out the details of a. then unknown government UFO study program by the Pentagon, by the Defense Intelligence Agency. And then a series of puzzling encounters across many years by Navy fighter pilots, Navy aviators, who had encountered craft or objects that behaved in ways that they could not explain.

And that they did not believe the U. S. had technology to match. And that there was video that backed up those Navy pilots testimony that the Pentagon eventually released. There's a series of videos that are called the Tic Tac video and the gimbal and the FLIR. And on them, there are these objects that sort of move in weird ways or appear to move in weird ways.

And you began to see some congressional attention around this. It's actually an issue that has remained pretty bipartisan heavy in terms of getting attention from both panic from Democrats and Republicans in places like the Senate Intelligence Committee around trying to push the government towards greater levels of transparency about what it does know about UFOs.

And that there was a specific moment for me when, again, we began 2020, John Brennan gave an interview to a DC journalist named Tyler Cowen. John Brennan had just wrapped up the better part of a decade as President Obama's CIA Director and Homeland Security Advisor. He was a career intelligence officer.

I've covered him. I've interviewed him. He's a very serious guy. And he'd spent the better part of a decade atop the U. S. intelligence committee, or U. S. intelligence community. And he said in this very weird, tortured syntax, effectively, there's some weird stuff out there, we don't know what it is, and some might say that this phenomenon could constitute what some might recognize as a new form of life.

It's a really weird sentence. And also, to me, stuck out because I figured there can't be that many things that puzzle someone like John Brennan. Like, when John Brennan woke up in the morning as CIA director or White House Homeland Security advisor, Any question that occurred to him, there was a massive intelligence apparatus that would go out there and try to answer it.

Analysts and undercover operatives and intelligence officers and satellites and signals intelligence intercept networks. If John Brennan woke up and said, tell me what Ben had for breakfast. Last Tuesday, like there's probably a reporting system and surveillance system that could come up with what that answer is, by the end of the day.

And so if John Brennan is leaving office at the end of his entire career, at the end of these eight years as CIA director and Homeland Security advisor, and he's saying, man, this UFO thing, it's really puzzling and I don't know what it is. And I don't think we know what it is. That felt to me like something that was worth diving into and trying to better understand.

Ben: That's fascinating. 

When I put all of your work together, reading your books, one of the things which stood out about you then taking the 9 11 oral testimony was that was based on primary evidence, people's actual truths. And you were writing it. writing it down. And so that almost strikes us in comparison to some of these other conspiracy things as well.

And I was stuck in Manhattan over 9 11 and one of the things I remembered very much was the smell and the visceral feeling and you get that in a lot of the oral testimony. Do you see that as your work as a modern historian taking this? You looked at You've looked at government, you've looked at conspiracy, you've looked at this, and then you've also taken primary evidence and the truth.

Is there something that you think people might not appreciate around the oral testimony in 9 11 and how you see that in your overall work? 

Garrett: Yeah, it's a great question. The way that I talk about my work and the subjects that I write on books wise is that I mostly do near history. Things that are just old enough that they're not current events anymore and are slipping from memory into history, but are new enough that there's research that hasn't been mined, archives that haven't been mined and that is recent enough that, We probably misunderstand it.

A big part of my work is basically like returning to these things, 10, years later that have this, popular mythology built up around them and then trying to put together all that we have learned. Since that event, to better understand what that event actually was when it was happening.

Because, journalism is, as famously said, is, the rough first draft of history. But it generally gets things pretty wrong as more details come out. And that we better understand, motivations and and even in some cases, basic facts, only as documents are declassified or memoirs come out years later kind of thing.

And so I generally try to choose topics that have a Modern salience that and then tried to help us help use that history to explain why we are, why America is, why the world is the way that it is today based on our understanding of how this history went down. What drew me back to Watergate.

Was covering Donald Trump and covering the investigations around Donald Trump and, wondering what was it like the last time America confronted a corrupt and criminal president in office, and how did it work, and how did the system function, and what really happened in and around the White House as that was going on.

Which, we've really only come to understand Watergate really in the last 10 or 15 years. That the Watergate that Americans thought that they were living through in the 1970s turns out to be, just this like incredibly narrow slice of what was going on beneath the surface and the motivations and the personalities and the players who were involved in all of these events as they transpired.

Ben: Yeah, it's very hard to know when you're living in the moment or very near moment, what are the actual forces and truth around it. So my final kind of trio of questions then would be when you alluded to that is, do you have anything around your writing process that you'd like to share, whether it's either unique or just how you do it?

Are you a morning writer, afternoon writer? You obviously do a lot of deep research and it's interesting you're interested in this near history. But do you just, does it all just come out after the research? And as a segue to that, are there any current projects you'd want to, you'd want to hint at?

And the last one would be if you had any I guess it's life advice or writing advice around how people should think about the world or what you've learned in general. So writing process. Into into those final thoughts. 

Garrett: Yeah, so I try I generally try to describe my career as explanatory journalism which to me is really distinct from Like investigative journalism, like I am not someone who has a particular skill in you know sussing out the document that like no one has ever seen before or you know getting the testimony of some secret source that no one has ever talked to before.

The thing that I do is the like hoovering up of an enormous body of research and then trying to organize it and explain these events and stories and histories in, oh, the most clear and most comprehensive way that anyone has yet tried to do. And, that was really what my Watergate journey was, which is, here's a, story that is one of the most covered subjects of all time.

And yet it has been covered in all of these narrow slivers and individual memoirs or, time limited books. And, now let's collect all of that work over 50 years and tell the story. In a more comprehensive way and a more clear way than anyone has ever tried to do before. That was, in many ways the same thing I was trying to do with UFO, which is, here's a subject that has an enormous body of primary sources behind it, but that no one in a long time has tried to sit down and explain and organize in a Clear.

And I would like to think objective and open-minded way. You know that probably a lot. I think a lot of the challenge of the literature around UFOs is almost everyone comes to writing about it with a very clear agenda at the start. Either you are a total believer. And are writing something to convince others that aliens are visiting.

Or you're a total skeptic and are trying to write, a grand debunking. And, I think if people read the UFO book, what they'll see is, I'm not trying to do either. And I think that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, that UFOs probably don't constitute alien visits, but aliens probably exist, and there is something real to UFOs that we don't know what it is, and the answers to which could end up being just as world transforming and Fascinating and revelatory As if the answer was aliens, that it, we could really see our understanding of the world transformed just by solving the mystery of UFOs.

Now I just finished actually my next book, which comes out in June of this year and will be published both in the U. S. and the U. K. In, in June, that is going back to my oral history work, and it is an oral history of D Day. And June 6th of course, is the 80th anniversary of D Day. And this is a moment when the generation of D Day veterans is really passing from the earth.

And this book tries to in a very classic me way,

capture This incredibly broad set of voices and participants in that day, American, British, Canadian, German, French Polish Norwegian Kiwis, Australians, all sorts of different perspectives of that day. And and tell that day in a very comprehensive and definitive way using the voices of the participants themselves.

So you can't quite see my office floor here, but I am surrounded by two foot tall stacks of D Day histories and memoirs and military reports. And it's about a hundred and fifty or two hundred books on my floor here. And I went through another couple thousand oral histories in archives in the U. S. and Canada and U. K. And the sort of final bit of your question about how I work is what I do is I take all of this research and then I write these like incredibly long first drafts and then basically, Over some period of time, really whittle them down to the essence of the story as best I can.

And so the D Day oral history. I started in August and September with a first draft that was about 1. 5 million words and then whittled it down to the, 166, 000 words that it will end up being published around. And went through that vast draft and ended up cutting, basically nine out of every 10 words out of the book to get it down to, the essence of the story as best I could.

Ben: That's amazing. So I very much look forward to that. So that will be mid this year, June, 2024 book on D Day. And a reminder, latest book also on UFOs. Book on Watergate and the oral history on 9 11, The Only Plane in the Sky. That was a really excellent conversation and I thank you very much.

Garrett: Absolutely a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.